Improvements in organizing and accessing information have made tremendous changes in the structure of human society throughout history and pre-history. The development of more effective visually based user interfaces for the retrieval and presentation of information stored in software databases is a fundamental dynamic of information technology. The invention of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the mouse input device greatly increased an end-user's access to information stored within a computer system or other machine. The advances in the art of computer system user interface design made possible by the mouse and the GUI greatly expedited the expansion of computing systems into the economic mainstream of the world community.
The prior art of computer user interfaces is focused generally upon retrieving information as specifically requested by an end-user and within a systematically imposed narrow informational context or content. This conventional narrowness of informational content is found in the prior art both in the processes of accepting and deconstructing data queries, and in providing data that are selected from the database and that are then used to form answers to user queries. Contemporaneously, however, with the propagation of GUIs, the mouse, and other user information selection and indication tools, the art of computer system design and manufacture has made great strides in creating economically efficient database hardware and software appliances and products that often outstrip the ability of prior art user interfaces to optimally enable access to data existing within the computer system or other machine. There is, therefore, a long felt need to increase the availability of data stored within a computer system to the user by enhancing the capacity of the user interface visually, graphically, textually, and/or by other sensory output modes to represent data, and relationships among data, stored in a computer system or other machine.